Rise Above ✓

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

 

Brendon was hyperventilating.

He sat hugging the bottom of the toilet bowl in the hospital’s restroom, crying and heaving. He’d already emptied his stomach twice but he wouldn’t stop dry heaving, his muscles aching painfully. That was just after his realization that he had to find a cure for Spencer in less than two hours.

That’s no time to lose your stomach, Brendon! Get the fuck off your ass and find the fucking antidote!

He quickly got up on shaky legs and flushed the toilet, rushing out to wash his face and hands and then he was quickly running down to the labs thanking the goddess that the hospital he’d rushed Spencer to was the same one they worked in. It was late and most people had gone home except those on the night shift but Brendon didn’t even care.

He pulled out his phone and felt his stomach sinking with trepidation when he put an alarm for one hour.

He was giving himself one hour to find the cure. If he couldn’t do it…

No, that was the wrong way to think. This was Spencer. This was his mate – he had no choice but to find the cure. He normally didn’t take his phone with him into the lab – neither did Spence – but now he needed the heavy weight in his pocket as a reminder that time was running out.

His hands were shaking violently when he finally got to the changing rooms outside the labs, frantically putting on his scrubs and then rushing into the lab. He couldn’t stop quivering and his breaths were coming in fast and choppy, making his chest hurt and his stomach muscles clench. He couldn’t breathe. He was panicking too much.

Just looking at the lab made him so fucking mad! How on earth was he going to do this? How was he going to find the cure for a virus to which they’d only just discovered how it worked?

Breathe, Brendon. Come on. Think!

Nothing but static filled his brain. His mind kept replaying the time he’d pressed the nozzle of the bottle, the way Spencer had clutched at his face and his screams of pure agony.

Even if he managed to save Spencer, would the beta – no, alpha – would he even want Brendon anymore?

The thought made Brendon’s heart shatter into a million pieces underneath his ribs.

It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want me anymore. IT’s understandable – I tried to fucking kill him. Sure, I was in the middle of a panic attack because of the alpha pheromones but that wasn’t an excuse.

“Spencer,” he whispered on a broken sob. “Spencer.”

He clenched his eyes shut so the tears could fall before he moved on, needing to do something, anything. He got the test tubes filled with samples of Aide Wellis’s and Setris’s blood, putting both samples into discs and staring helplessly at them, his hands still shaking. Hot fat tears welled up in his eyes again and he felt so weak, so completely useless and now the best thing that has ever happened to him was going to die – because of him.

He blinked, the tears rolling down his cheeks and soaking into his face mask, his blurred vision clearing as he frowned at a half-finished bottle of water left on the work top, right beside the discs of blood.

Lillian.

Are you fucking serious? This wasn’t the first time the female beta was doing this! She always came into the lab with a fucking drink or other, grumbling that it was safe as long as she watched it but then almost always forgot the damn thing in the lab. This was why she was going to remain an assistant for the rest of her fucking life.